agonized editorial sessions, in those days at McCallâs . âSuddenly, everybody was looking for this spiritual significance in togetherness, expecting us to make some mysterious religious movement out of the life everyone had been leading for the last five yearsâcrawling into the home, turning their backs on the worldâbut we never could find a way of showing it that wasnât a monstrosity of dullness,â a former McCallâs editor reminisces. âIt always boiled down to, goody, goody, goody, Daddy is out there in the garden barbecuing. We put men in the fashion pictures and the food pictures, and even the perfume pictures. But we were stifled by it editorially.
âWe had articles by psychiatrists that we couldnât use because they would have blown it wide open: all those couples propping their whole weight on their kids. But what else could you do with togetherness but child care? We were pathetically grateful to find anything else where we could show father photographed with mother. Sometimes, we used to wonder what would happen to women, with men taking over the decorating, child care, cooking, all the things that used to be hers alone. But we couldnât show women getting out of the home and having a career. The irony is, what we meant to do was to stop editing for women as women, and edit for the men and women together. We wanted to edit for people, not women.â
But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of womenâs loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?
In 1956, at the peak of togetherness, the bored editors of McCallâs ran a little article called âThe Mother Who Ran Away.â To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. âIt was our moment of truth,â said a former editor. âWe suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.â
But by then the new image of American woman, âOccupation: housewife,â had hardened into a mystique, unquestioned and permitting no questions, shaping the very reality it distorted.
By the time I started writing for womenâs magazines, in the fifties, it was simply taken for granted by editors, and accepted as an immutable fact of life by writers, that women were not interested in politics, life outside the United States, national issues, art, science, ideas, adventure, education, or even their own communities, except where they could be sold through their emotions as wives and mothers.
Politics, for women, became Mamieâs clothes and the Nixonsâ home life. Out of conscience, a sense of duty, the Ladiesâ Home Journal might run a series like âPolitical Pilgrimâs Progress,â showing women trying to improve their childrenâs schools and playgrounds. But even approaching politics through mother love did not really interest women, it was thought in the trade. Everyone knew those readership percentages. An editor of Redbook ingeniously tried to bring the bomb down to the feminine level by showing the emotions of a wife whose husband sailed into a contaminated area.
âWomen canât take an idea, an issue, pure,â men who edited the mass womenâs magazines agreed. âIt has to be translated in terms they can understand as women.â This was so well understood by those who wrote for womenâs magazines that a natural